


these words are knives that often leave scars (the fear of falling apart)

by doctorkaitlyn



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24858274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorkaitlyn/pseuds/doctorkaitlyn
Summary: ...and truth be told, I never was yours.(or, the five places in Derry Richie wroteR + Eas a child, and the one time he wrote it as an adult.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	these words are knives that often leave scars (the fear of falling apart)

**Author's Note:**

> originally written during Nanowrimo 2019. why I decided to venture into this fandom with angst, I don't know, but here's this! please heed the tags (if there are any that I've forgotten, please let me know!). 
> 
> title from [This is Gospel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGE381tbQa8) by Panic! At The Disco.

**i.**

It first happens in math class.

It’s one of those days during the liminal phase between spring and summer, the phase where rain pounds the sidewalks during the morning and evening and the sun burns hot and clear in the afternoon. On this particular day, the rain is lashing against the windows of Richie’s classroom, but he can see the sun trying desperately to come out, lurking behind a filmy layer of cloud cover. Hopefully, by lunch time, it’ll be shining bright, but for now, it’s a positively miserable view, so he reluctantly turns his view away from the outside world. 

Instead of swiveling his eyes towards the front of the room, where Ms. Jessup is doing her best to teach English in an engaging way, he turns his gaze to the right, to Eddie’s desk. Eddie is almost motionless; the only parts of him moving are his eyes, flicking between Ms. Jessup and his notebook, and his hand, moving across the page as he jots down notes. Something about the way he looks, cautious and studious, skin smooth and pale underneath the harsh overhead lights, the outline of his inhaler visible in the pocket of his trousers, sticks in Richie’s head, hooks itself there like a fish on a line. There’s nothing particularly _special_ about the moment; he’s seen Eddie like this hundreds of times. But even when he tries to pay attention to the lesson, his eyes keep drifting in Eddie’s direction. 

He’s spent much of the class filling his pages with some notes for a zombie comic idea that him and Bill have been floating around, and before he’s really aware of what he’s doing, he finds himself penciling in some letters underneath the last part of his outline. The letters are stark and clear, so clear that if someone were to look over, if _Eddie_ (or, lord fucking forbid, Henry goddamn Bowers, sitting in front of Eddie) were to look over, they would be hard-pressed to mistake the letters for something else. 

_R + E._

Face hot, like he’s been struck with a blistering fever, he flips his pencil over. For one horrifying moment, he fumbles his grip and nearly drops the stupid thing, and he swears that he can feel his heart stop. 

Thankfully, before it slips out of his grasp entirely, he snatches it with the tips of his fingers, and he immediately attacks his paper with his eraser, removing not only the incriminating letters but also part of the outline that he has put so much work into. Only once the letters have been completely removed does he dare look over at Eddie again.

Nothing about Eddie has changed. He’s still taking down his notes, absently gnawing on the corner of his lip, totally oblivious. In front of him, Bowers is busy passing a cigarette across the aisle to Belch, and while that’s not a confirmation that he didn’t see anything, Richie doesn’t want to risk attracting Bower’s attention, so he quickly returns his gaze to the window, hoping that his racing heart and heaving lungs (which, if this is how Eddie feels like when he’s having an asthma attack, holy fuck, no wonder he’s so pissed off all the time) aren’t visible on the outside. 

Stupid. 

He _can’t_ be this stupid, not if he wants to make it out of Derry in one piece, with his life intact. 

He can’t do it again.

**ii.**

He does it again.

It’s a less rainy day, but it’s overcast, no sunshine to be found. The library, usually a place that feels _alive_ no matter how hard the librarians try to get them to shut the fuck up, is quiet and dark. Even though it’s a fairly small room, miniscule when compared to the town library, the shelves seem endless. Standing in the main aisle and glancing to his right and left, the ends of the other aisles are shrouded in ominous shadows that are thick enough to be a monster’s cloak. While he isn’t the only one in the room (indeed, most of the tables in the middle of the room, surfaces battered and scarred, littered with pencil shavings and the dark curls from pink erasers, are occupied), he feels removed from everyone else, like he’s in one dimension and they’re in another, so close and yet so far away. 

Doing his best to shake off the feeling, he heads into the shelves to find what he needs for his science project. Normally, he lets Bill take the lead on this kind of thing, but he has the afternoon off to see a speech therapist in Bangor, so it’s up to Richie to find the books they need for their assignment on ascorbic acid. 

(He’d thought about asking Eddie if he wanted to come along, but Eddie’s mom isn’t a fan of the library – too much dust and not enough cleaning, she says – and on this particular day, he hadn’t felt like pushing his luck with Sonia Kaspbrak.)

The shelves he needs are tucked into the back corner of the room, out of sight of all of the tables. It’s so dark that he has to peer close to the shelves in order to read the titles, which in turn makes him cough loud enough to split the silence of the library. 

He hates agreeing with Eddie’s mom, but there’s no contesting it; there is a fuck ton of dust hanging around. On some shelves, where there aren’t enough books to fill the row from end to end, the dust has blanketed the wood in a thick layer. It looks like dirty snow or fresh ashes, and the unbroken surface of it is begging to be disturbed. 

Richie has never been good at denying his impulses.

Quickly glancing around to make sure that he’s still alone (because even though he hasn’t heard footsteps, it still feels like someone is watching him, feels like there are eyes fixed on him, the yellow eyes of a beast in the dark), he reaches forward and runs his finger through the dust, tracing out a phrase that his mind seems to be chanting non-stop these days. Once he’s finished, he takes a step back to, well, not so much admire his work as study it, all the while burying more coughs into his elbow as the disturbed dust floats in the air around him. 

_R + E._

He’s never been much of a fan of his own handwriting, but he thinks the letters look nice together. 

Before he can get too lost in the moment, he actually does hear footsteps, and he hurriedly wipes the letters, together with the rest of the dust, off the shelf with his sleeve (which is, thankfully, already dirty, thanks to getting peanut butter on it at lunch) and pretends to be perusing the books, even as he wills his heart to quiet down. 

“Th-there you are,” he hears as the footsteps round the stacks to his aisle, and Richie lets out a deep, audible breath of absolute fucking relief. 

Never before has he been so glad to see Bill. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Richie hisses under his breath. “What happened to your appointment?” 

“Cuh-cancelled,” Bill answers, glancing at the bookshelves with a slight frown. “F-find anything?” 

For the next twenty minutes, Richie pulls double duty. On the surface, to anyone who happens to be looking on- 

(like the eyes that he swears he can feel on him the entire time, lurking in the stacks, just out of sight)

-he’s pulling down book after book, passing them over to Bill to scrutinize. But underneath, he’s trying his very best not to look over at the shelf, trying not to think about how right their initials had looked together, trying his very best not to linger on the fact that, frankly, if he keeps this up, his best friends might cut him out of their lives. As badly as that would hurt, if anyone outside of their group finds out, if Bowers and Patrick Hocksetter and their lackeys find out, he might not make it through the summer. 

If his _parents_ find out? Fuck, if Eddie’s mom, with her seemingly infinite library of ‘fun’ facts about AIDS that she’s passed down to Eddie, finds out? 

The thought of those particular possibilities almost makes him heave his lunch into the corner of the library. 

By the time they stumble out of the library, their backpacks are laden down with no less than six books, but Richie’s mind is no closer to shutting up.

**iii.**

No matter how hard he tries to be subtle, no matter how hard he tries to be like the rest of them, no matter how hard he tries to stay fucking _quiet,_ if not verbally then physically and emotionally, he can’t contain himself.

The next time his emotions overflow, he’s in Freese’s Department Store. 

It’s one of the rare days that summer where there are only a handful of them together, just him and Eddie and Beverly. As much as Richie likes being around the rest of them (all together now, like the Beatles used to say), there’s something to be said about being in a smaller group. There’s almost no talk of the clown, of the creature stalking Derry – if he concentrates, he can almost pretend that it has been a normal summer. He can almost pretend that they’re just _kids_ , kids with nothing more pressing to do than hang out with their friends. 

On this particular day, the three of them are trying to beat the brutal heat by ducking into the arcade and then into a movie at the Capitol and then to the ice cream parlor, each of them getting a cone and swapping back and forth so they can try each of the flavors. Even Eddie joins in – sure, he floats out his usual spiel about germs, and how disgusting the human mouth is-

(“Are you sure? Your mom’s mouth seemed plenty clean to me last time I inspected it!” Richie had interrupted him with, which had earned him a middle finger salute.)

-and how the server at the parlor hadn’t been wearing gloves, so who knew what was all over the waffle cones in their hands, but he participates nonetheless, carefully sampling Richie’s coffee and Bev’s mint chocolate chip and offering up his own French vanilla. 

Richie, of course, is contractually obliged to make a joke about Eddie wandering out of his comfort zone by getting French vanilla instead of normal, plain, boring, vanilla, how maybe he’ll end up adventurous and kinky one day like the rest of them. In response, Eddie splutters furiously, chokes on half a dozen words before he settles for muttering, “Fuck you, Trashmouth,” and buries his face back into his rapidly melting ice cream, cheeks as red as a sunburn, looking utterly adorable despite (or perhaps because of) his fury. 

Maybe it’s that sight that causes Richie to boil over. Maybe it’s the whole day, the fact that he feels like he doesn’t have to worry for once, like he can be himself. He almost feels _free_. 

(Of course, he can never be fully himself, even around his friends, but if this is as close as he can get… well, he can live with that. For now, at least.) 

After they’ve consumed most of their ice cream, excluding the parts that had dripped over their fingers and down into the grass-

(Eddie had carefully licked melted streaks of vanilla off of his fingers before he pulled a bottle of noxious smelling hand sanitizer out of his ridiculous fanny pack and scrubbed at his skin furiously, and while Richie had known that it was a nasty thought to have, even for him, the way that Eddie had licked his fingers clean had made him picture Eddie licking something _else_ clean.

Thankfully, before it could be too obvious what he had been thinking about, the smell of the hand sanitizer had wafted into his nose, officially killing his boner faster than he could say _Eddie’s mom_ , which is usually what he thought about in order to kill inappropriately timed boners.)

-it’s still way too hot for them to walk all the way to the Barrens in one fell swoop; there isn’t a cloud in the sky, not even a hint of a breeze to provide some relief. They agree to make the trip in stages, moving from one building to the other. The first stop on the agenda is Freese’s, not only because it’s close, but because, according to Beverly, it’s one of the easiest places in town to shoplift from, staffed mostly by people who should have retired a decade ago and high school students that want the easiest summer job possible. 

Richie, admittedly, has never tried it, but he’s curious to see if Beverly is right. 

But they don’t go for that immediately. Instead, they wander around, aimlessly fiddling with objects in the homewares section, pretending to turn tablecloths into dresses, testing out the sharpness of the cutlery on the display tables (all of which is hopelessly dusty and dull). They flip through magazines and books, and eventually, they end up downstairs in the toy department, surrounded by aisle after aisle. While the setup is physically the same, the vibe can’t be any different from the school’s library. There are no watching eyes here, nothing ominous or eerie; the lights are deliriously bright overhead, and laughter burbles from half a dozen spots, accompanied by the chirps and beeps as kids test out toys or show off the ones they want to their parents. 

“Last time I was here, they had a slingshot I was looking at,” Beverly says thoughtfully, glancing down an aisle. “Wonder if it’s still here.” 

“What do you want a slingshot for?” Eddie asks, trailing after Bev as she starts walking away from the stairs that spilled them out into the department. Bev glances back over her shoulder with a frown. 

“I don’t know. Thought it would come in handy.” 

Whatever Eddie says next is drowned out as they round a corner, leaving Richie at the bottom of the stairs. There’s a chalkboard mounted on a nearby wall, even bigger than the ones at school. The top half of the chalkboard, the part where the little kids can’t reach, outlines the latest specials and sales in neat block printing in six different colors – forty percent off army toys to celebrate Fourth of July, buy one, get one free on comic books, etc. The lower half of the chalkboard is an absolute contrast to the top, chaos versus order, nearly incomprehensible in spots, littered with the deranged scribbling of children, covered in doodles (including what looks like a dick, in the bottom left corner, but that could just be Richie’s mind going wild). 

Amazingly, there aren’t any children hanging around the chalkboard. Even more amazingly, there is a tiny wedge of space on the right side of the board, just enough space for a cramped little doodle or a few letters. 

The impulse hits Richie almost as hard as one of Bower’s fists. Smashing his wrist off the shelf that holds the chalk and erasers in his haste, he grabs a piece of blue chalk and writes his piece. 

_R + E._

His stomach starts churning immediately, and his brain screams at him to erase the damned thing, erase it before he’s caught red handed (or blue handed, as the case may be), before he’s called upon to explain himself. However, when he takes a few stumbling steps backwards, he realizes that, actually, the letters are barely visible. They blend into the chaos of the blackboard, only recognizable if you know exactly what to look for. 

And at the end of the day, the letters will be gone, erased with the rest of the doodles. 

His stomach doesn’t entirely stop churning, but he does feel slightly better as, face burning, he turns his back on the chalkboard and heads down the aisle to find Eddie and Beverly. 

When they do eventually leave, the slingshot removed from its packaging and tucked into the back of Beverly’s shorts, the slight bulge it leaves mostly hidden by the strap of Eddie’s borrowed fanny pack, Richie tries not to look back at the chalkboard, in case the movement causes Eddie and Bev to follow his gaze, but he’s not successful. 

He’s surprised to see that the letters are already gone, covered up by a drawing of what looks like a penguin wearing a red fez, done in bold, colorful strokes. It’s pretty cute, actually, albeit a little nonsensical. 

Still, while the drawing is cute, and while it’s safer this way, safer that the letters have already been obliterated by an unknowing ally, his stomach continues to sink as he follows the two of them back up the stairs, barely registering that they’re talking to each other in muffled tones, probably scheming about what else they can steal before they continue their trip down to the Barrens. 

(And oh, if Eddie’s mom could see him now, if she could see him how _Richie_ sees him, could see that despite his protestations about being good and doing the right thing, he’s more than game to shoplift, Richie is sure that her whole head would pop off like the Standpipe springing a leak. 

Maybe someday, he’ll have the privilege of seeing that exact thing happen.) 

The rapid disappearance of the letters feels like a reminder that none of this can be permanent, a reminder that Eddie will never be his, that Eddie doesn’t _want_ to be his. He’s not even allowed to pretend, not for any longer than a few moments. 

Shaking his head, doing his best to physically dislodge those thoughts from his traitorous mind, he takes the stairs two at a time, almost tripping in the process, so that he can catch up with them. The thoughts will almost certainly come back, probably later tonight, when he’s lying in bed, staring up into the dark, unable to sleep for any number of reasons. 

For now, there are more important things to deal with, like the fact there’s still more than a mile between them and the Barrens, and it probably hasn’t gotten any cooler outside. 

He wonders if he can talk Bev into shoving some ice cream sandwiches into her shirt (or into Eddie’s fanny pack) if he creates a distraction. 

(The answer turns out to be yes.)

**iv.**

As the summer goes on, he dips his toes in the water a few times. He makes more inappropriate jokes, calls Eddie cute a few more times than is probably acceptable, tries to hide the true meanings of his words behind insults and pinches and punches pulled back at the last second so that he doesn’t hurt Eddie.

One day, a mere week before Eddie’s arm breaks, before he sees the bone of it sickeningly pressing into his pale skin, before they all splinter into bits like an old board that has been stomped on, before that motherfucker almost gets the best of them, he comes dangerously close to drowning. 

It’s another dry day, the sky occasionally dotted with a cloud as insubstantial as cotton candy. Richie wakes up early, scarfs down breakfast, eating as fast as his mom can pile food onto his plate, fills his bag with some comic books and his radio, and grabs his bike so that he can head down to the Barrens. He’s not going to make the same mistake he did last time – as much fun as it was to pal around with Eddie and Beverly, he doesn’t want to replay hopping from building to building and melting on the journey in between. He’s sure that the others will appear at some point – if no one has shown up by noon, he’ll use some of his allowance money at the payphone outside of Freese’s and give them a call. Until then, his comic books should keep him tided over. 

Except when he gets down into the Barrens, pulls up to the clearing containing their clubhouse, he realizes that he apparently wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep in today. The door is mostly hidden under tree limbs and some other debris that they leave around the edge of the clearing, but he can make out a glimpse of Eddie’s bike peeking out. Richie tucks his own bike under the pile and adds some more brush on top before he moves to the door. 

(The brush probably won’t fool Bowers and the others if they come stomping around, but it’s better than nothing. Besides, Henry has been suspiciously quiet lately – Richie has seen him a few times since the apocalyptic rock fight, but he hasn’t shown as much fervor for attacking them. 

It makes him suspicious, to say the least.) 

Getting down on his knees, he fumbles around the moss that’s been glued on top of the door as a disguise until he finds the notch that serves as a handle. Hooking his fingers in, he pulls upward, and the door swings open smoothly. The hinges, which they pooled their allowance money together to buy, don’t make a single squeak. 

Richie has to hand it to Ben – while they all helped out with the clubhouse, the thing was really his brainchild, and Richie is still a little amazed at how perfect it is, how smug it makes him feel, that they have a place of their own, an _adult_ place, where they can curse and smoke (and, on one memorable occasion, steal sips from a bottle of bourbon Ben snuck out of his house) without getting dirty looks or being told to quiet down. 

As he lowers himself down the ladder placed underneath the door and reaches up to pull the door shut, he hears a frantic rustle of movement from below. 

“Who the fuck is that?” Eddie yells. He’s probably trying to sound intimidating, but there’s an unmistakable note of fear in his voice that makes Richie want to beat up anyone who has ever scared Eddie, up to and including his own mother. 

Scratch that – especially including his mother. 

“Just me, Eddie Spaghetti,” he answers, pulling the door shut and plunging the room into darkness.

“Fuck you, Richie.” 

“I’ve been trying, but you keep saying no,” Richie automatically responds, just another one of those jokes that is barely hiding the truth. He remains on the ladder, keeps blinking, until his eyes adjust to the dark. Eddie is lying in the hammock, holding a flashlight. There’s a battery operated lantern resting in one corner, illuminating the small shelf that Ben put together using pieces of lumber rescued from the dump. The shelf is covered in knickknacks, an assortment of trinkets that they all contributed to, along with some books that they’ve been swapping back and forth over the course of the summer. A candle burns in another corner, filling the room with the scent of artificial roses. All of them had made fun of it when Bill showed up with it one day, liberated from one of his mother’s cabinets, but as soon as they’d lit it once, there was no going back. It cleaned the last remnants of the dump out of the air, made the place feel a little more official and less like some kind of cave. 

“Guess you’ll just have to keep trying then,” Eddie replies, directing his flashlight back at the comic book resting across his lap. He sounds tired, which Richie can relate to. They’ve all been tired lately, what with the stupid fucking clown popping up in their dreams and lives. 

“Guess so.” Richie puts most of his comic books on the shelf, save for the one on the very top of the stack, a new Batman that he’s excited to get into, takes one of the spare flashlights that they keep hanging around, and fishes out a shower cap from the box Stan brought for them. As always, he feels fucking absurd wearing it, but it sure as hell beats picking a spider out of his hair. 

(Although there’s absolutely nothing stopping one of them from crawling into his shorts and biting his dick, and now that he’s had _that_ thought, he really wishes that he’d worn pants, heat of the day be damned.) 

“How long have you been here?” he asks, crossing to the hammock. There are plenty of other places he could sit – in addition to the shelves, Ben fashioned a few low stools from the lumber, and there’s even an old armchair in the corner that they dragged back from the dump - but the hammock is the cleanest of the spots by fair, not to mention the most comfortable. 

The fact that it will also have him closest to Eddie is only one factor of his decision. 

“An hour, maybe?” When Richie knees Eddie in the leg, he rolls his eyes and shifts so that Richie can clamber in beside him. It takes Richie a moment to find his bearings, and they almost spill out twice (both times lead to a flurry of outraged cursing from Eddie), but eventually, he manages to make himself comfortable. His legs are draped over Eddie’s, and his feet are tucked underneath Eddie’s armpits, pressing into the webbing of the hammock. Eddie has gone for more of the direct route and has plopped his feet directly into Richie’s lap, heels digging into his stomach. 

Once they’ve gotten themselves situated, Eddie says, “You couldn’t sleep either?” 

Richie shakes his head. “I kept dreaming about something. Something bad. I don’t really remember what it was, but it was... I don’t know. Dark. Cold. Fucking terrifying.” Richie doesn’t want to talk about his dream, doesn’t want to talk about how he woke up with a scream trying to force its way out of his mouth, doesn’t want to talk about the painful goosebumps that had covered his whole body.

Despite everything, he still doesn’t want to seem _weak_ in front of any of them. Especially Eddie. 

So, trying to move the attention away from himself, he asks, “What about you? Bad dreams, or did your mother’s snoring get to you?” 

Eddie rolls his eyes obligingly, but there’s no real fire behind the action, particularly because it isn’t followed up by a barbed retort. Instead, after taking a moment to swallow (during which Richie ends up distracted by the bob of Eddie’s throat), he responds. “The leper again. When I woke up, it felt like he was crawling all over me again. Almost threw up.” 

Richie bites back a remark about how throwing up is nothing new for Eddie. Even with his admittedly skewed sense of what constitutes good behaviour, he knows that it’s mean and pointless and just another attempt to deflect them away from having to confront the horrible thing that’s been hanging over them for the entirety of summer, having to confront the knowledge that they might not all make it until September. 

Instead, he says, settling back further into the hammock, “Wonder if the others had the same kind of dreams.” 

“Maybe.” Eddie readjusts his flashlight so that it’s pointing down at his page. “They’ll probably be here soon anyways.” 

But that doesn’t end up being the case. Richie isn’t wearing a watch, and he didn’t bother setting up his radio, so he’s not entirely sure what the time is, but by the time he’s gone through two of his comics, they’re still alone in the clubhouse. Neither of them have talked for some time, engrossed in their respective books, and while Richie wouldn’t want to spend every day like this (he’s pretty sure that he would explode if he had to spend every day quiet and mostly still, aside from the repositioning and shifting that he couldn’t prevent even if he tried), it’s been nice. Even though there’s safety in numbers, even though he and Eddie wouldn’t stand a chance if Bowers and his goons stumbled across them, it still feels safe, being down here in the dark and quiet, together but in their own spheres, easily reachable, but not forced to entertain each other. 

It feels almost strange, how much Richie enjoys it. Truthfully, the more he thinks about it, the further his brain goes down a rabbit hole. He thinks about how nice it could be to have this option available to him, how nice it could be if the two of them could go from insulting and bickering with each other to spending time together in silence. His mind even helpfully provides him with the image of the two of them sitting on a porch together, in actual fucking _rocking chairs_ , snipping at each other (and probably yelling at kids to get off their goddamn lawn). 

It might be the most painful mental image that’s ever popped into his head, and not for the first time, he wants to curse out the sheer fucking cruelty of his own mind, which can’t seem to take the hint that, no matter how much he _wants_ something like that, he can never, ever, under any circumstances, have it. 

Not with a man. Not in Derry. And certainly not with Eddie. 

Suddenly, the clubhouse no longer feels safe. It feels _stifling._ Underneath the shower cap, his head feels hot and crawling, and his chest is growing tight, like there’s someone sitting astride of it. The walls feel like they’re creeping closer and closer, and if he doesn’t get out, all the breath in his body is going to be crushed out of his lungs. 

He plans on asking Eddie if he wants to go and get some candy as an excuse to flee, but before he can spring out of the hammock, he glances towards the end and realizes that, sometime over the last few minutes or hour, Eddie fell asleep. His head is lolling towards his shoulder, and his mouth is hanging open slightly. When Richie listens closely, he can hear Eddie’s breath, deep and steady as it leaves his chest. The flashlight is still loosely clutched in his fingertips, saved from clattering to the ground only by the netting of the hammock, and his comic book is open in his lap, turned to a page in the middle. 

If he’s dreaming, there’s no sign of it, no twitching legs or sharp intakes of breath as he tries to outrun a nightmare. He’s quiet and still. He looks… peaceful.

Even though the walls still feel too close, Richie no longer wants to move. He still feels like crap, but he doesn’t want to ruin Eddie’s sleep. That being said, he _has_ run out of reading material, so he leans forward and carefully extracts the comic book from Eddie’s chest. He stirs only momentarily, long enough to smack his lips a little, before he settles back asleep. As Richie leans back, his fingers brush over Eddie’s legs, underneath his kneecap, where the skin is streaked with light brown hair. Eddie doesn’t move and, before Richie can stop himself, he finds himself writing the same letters that he’s left in so many other places around Derry. 

_R + E._

He traces the letters quickly, but carefully, into Eddie’s skin. For a moment after he’s done, fingertip hovering above Eddie’s leg, he waits with bated breath, sure that Eddie is tricking him somehow, that he’s been awake this whole time, waiting to catch Richie in some kind of prank. He waits for Eddie to spring up and catch him in the act. 

He waits for the ground to drop out from underneath him. 

Eddie doesn’t move. He remains asleep, one hand resting on his chest now that the comic book is no longer there, rising and falling gently with every one of his breaths. Sucking in a great, heaving breath, Richie sags back into the hammock, bends down the corner of the page that Eddie was on so that he doesn’t lose his spot (he’s probably going to catch hell for it later, but he’ll also probably catch hell if he _doesn’t_ do it), and flips back to the beginning, flashlight trained at the page. 

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep as well, but it seems like it happens in the blink of an eye – one moment, he’s staring down at the page, and the next, he’s bolting awake at the sound of the trapdoor opening. At the opposite end of the hammock, Eddie also wakes violently and cries out. Going into full fight or flight mode, Richie snatches up his flashlight from where it’s tangled in the hammock and tightens his grip around the handle. 

Thankfully, mere seconds later, Beverly lowers herself into the clubhouse, shins bared by her cut-off denim shorts. She lands nimbly and grins at them as, behind her, Ben starts making his way down as well. 

“Hey there, sleepy-heads,” she says, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket as she walks over to grab a shower cap. “Did we miss anything exciting?” 

Looking back on the day, Richie can pinpoint it as the last day of that summer that he felt really, truly, safe.

**v.**

After that, for a few weeks, things get so complicated, what with them confronting Pennywise (and barely making it out alive) and their friend group imploding, that his _thing_ for Eddie, the thing that feels like it might burst out of his chest, takes a backseat.

But then, during the period of time when they haven’t patched things up and they haven’t ended things with the clown, the period where every single day feels like a storm is going to hit, no matter how hard Richie tries to pretend like everything is normal, tries to pretend that he isn’t lonely from the moment he wakes up to the moment he falls asleep, the arcade happens. 

It’s an accident. Sort of. He knows what he’s doing, and he knows that he’s being over the top, that he’s being _desperate_ , but he can’t seem to stop. He’s missed having someone to talk to, especially about video games. Sure, the others rolled their eyes and only half-listened most of the time, but still, at least they were some kind of sounding board. Having someone actually pay attention to him is _addictive_. 

And also, the guy is cute in a rough around the edges kind of way. Sue him. 

But then he pushes it too far, and Bowers comes around the corner, and everyone in the arcade, a dozen kids or more, hears what Bowers calls him. 

He’s dreamed of this. He knew that it would probably happen eventually, but he was always sure that he’d be able to play it off, that he’d be able to use his smart mouth to turn it back around and deflect attention from himself until he can escape this shithole of a fucking town. But in all of those dreams, it has never taken this form. It has never been quite so humiliating, so painful. 

He wants desperately to talk back, but nothing that makes sense comes to mind. His mouth keeps opening, but all the thoughts in his head are disjointed. He can barely think of a coherent sentence, let alone a snappy insult. If he so much as tries, either the laughter that is already travelling across the room is going to grow louder, or Bowers is going to swing for him, maybe smash his face into one of the games, break his glasses (again) or worse. 

So instead, he does what Bowers tells him to.

He runs. 

He runs down the street, out into the blinding sun and sweltering heat of the day, still hearing the laughter even when the arcade is out of sight. He runs, feet slamming into the sidewalk, sweat streaming down his forehead and into his eyes, rendering him nearly blind. He runs until his body cannot take it anymore, and he comes to a halt with his hands on his knees, bent in half, heaving for breath, feeling like he’s about to upchuck onto his sneakers. 

If he ran this fast in gym class last year, maybe he would have gotten a better grade. 

Eventually, he falls to his knees and slumps sideways against a wooden fence, the rough surface scraping against his arm. It still feels like sweat is pouring down his face, even though he’s stopped, and it takes him a second to piece it together. 

He’s crying. 

He whips his glasses off and grinds his palms into his eyes, smearing tears across his face, willing them to stop. But as soon as he pulls his hands away, more spring up to take their place. A car drives by, and while part of him waits for something to be hurled out the window at him, whether it be a physical object or more words, nothing comes. 

Which, actually, isn’t surprising. If there were only adults in the car, Richie doubts that they even saw him, not in any real way. Maybe their eyes flickered over to him momentarily, but they probably didn’t _register_ him. 

He stays on the ground, pebbles and sand grinding into his bare knees, the fence digging splinters into the meat of his shoulder, until his breath is mostly back to normal, until he no longer feels like he’s going to hurl everywhere. There are a few dark circles on the ground in front of him where his tears fell to the earth, and he swipes his hand over them until they’re no longer visible, until there’s dirt and grit under his fingernails and ground into the faint lines of his palm. His eyes hurt, his lungs and ribs throb, his chest aches, and he’s covered in dirt and snot and tears. 

He hates this fucking town. He hates it with everything that he has. 

Slowly, he raises his head, and it’s only then that he realizes where he is. He’s at the Kissing Bridge, and the fence that he’s been leaning against is covered with initials and hearts and names, some of them crossed out or scratched over, some of the messages fairly benign, some of them cruel or outright disgusting. Up ahead, where the covered portion of the bridge arches over the road, he can see where the fence is cracked and warped, presumably from the incident that brought Ben into their lives, the incident where Bowers came close to murdering him. Richie isn’t surprised that it hasn’t been fixed – it’ll probably stay that way for years, maybe until someone drunkenly leans against it and goes plunging down the hill and snaps their neck. 

Sitting up straight, Richie stares at the fence. While most of it is covered, there are a few blank spaces here and there, a few spaces where someone has carved only tentatively, so it would be all too easy to go over top of their initials. 

It’s stupid, what he wants to do. Considering what happened to him not even an hour ago, it would be outright idiotic to put his feelings out into the world, where anyone could see them, where they’d be actually exposed. 

But fuck it. What are the chances that someone is going to make out their initials among the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of other engravings on the fence? Even if someone did pick out his inscription in particular, what are the chances that that person will connect the dots back to him? Derry may be a small town, but it’s not _that_ small – there are plenty of people whose names begin with R. Some of them probably even have feelings for people whose names begin with E. 

Before he can change his mind, he reaches into his pockets and pulls out his penknife. It’s a sad, pathetic looking thing that he started carrying around at the beginning of the summer, and he’s never used it for anything more than cutting threads off clothes or idly gouging lines into wood, but he thinks that it’ll do the trick. Flicking the blade open, he picks a spot and starts carving. 

It doesn’t take long before the letters are there. The wood underneath is brighter than that on the surface, exposed to the air for the first time in a long while, and Richie can’t help but trace his fingers through the carving as he leans back and surveys his work. 

_R + E._

He flicks the knife closed, returns it to his pocket and stands up. He lets his eyes linger on the letters for a little longer before he turns his back on the fence and starts walking towards the bridge. 

Things came too close to imploding today. He has no doubt that, by the day’s end, even though he’s not on speaking terms with his friends at the moment, at least one of them will have heard about what went down at the arcade. If they ever start talking again, he’s sure that he’ll be able to laugh it off, blame it on Bowers being Bowers. But he’s flying too close to the sun. If he’s not careful, he’s going to slip again, and this time, it’ll be in front of Eddie. And if Eddie asked him honestly, if he asked him to tell him the truth… 

Well, Richie doesn’t think he’d be able to lie. Not in that situation. Not to _Eddie._

He can’t keep doing this. 

So, as he walks over the bridge, he makes a promise to himself. He promises to lock away the parts of him that keep acting out like this, the parts of him that seem almost desperate to be caught. He promises to take all of his feelings for Eddie, all the ones that go any further than platonic, and lock them away in the same little box, padlock and chain it, and throw away all the keys. 

Maybe one day, he’ll be able to open that box up again. 

But not so long as he’s in Derry. 

Not so long as he’s here.

**vi.**

He’s mostly successful at keeping those feelings locked up. He leaves Derry a few months after everything goes down – his parents spontaneously decide that they want a change of scenery, and he can’t be bothered to protest. Moreover, he doesn’t really _want_ to protest - the _Welcome to Derry_ sign retreating in the rear view mirror is one of the most wonderful sights he’s seen in his short life.

He’s better at forgetting about Eddie than he is at forgetting about all of the other things he has locked up. 

But seeing Eddie again, seeing him walk into the backroom of the Chinese restaurant that Mike has booked for them, seeing how he grew up, how he got _old_ like the rest of them, the same person as always, just with a far more foul mouth? 

It’s like taking a trip down several memory lanes all at once. All of those feelings come rushing back. All of the most painful memories he could ask for, the memory of that morning they spent together in the hammock, snippets of other times they were together, of moments that Richie felt himself tripping into what felt like, at the time, the most profound kind of love, punch him directly in the face. He remembers what it was like listening to Eddie go off on one of his ill-informed rants, remembers how he still found Eddie cute, even then, when he was babbling on about some kind of gross bodily function or rare disease. He remembers when they all had sleepovers (with the exception of Bev, unfortunately – while some of their parents were liberal, none of them were _that_ liberal, and it was unsaid but known that if Bev’s father ever found out that she’d had a sleepover with a bunch of boys, he would have walloped her black and blue), and he’d wake up in the middle of the night beside Eddie. Eddie always slept with his sleeping bag pulled up to the base of his throat, probably following a long ingrained instruction from his mother. Richie usually had to squint to see him, but sometimes, when it felt like he wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep, he’d focus on Eddie’s face, watch the minute twitches under his skin, listen to the small sounds coming out of his mouth, until he eventually passed back out. 

It’s not a phenomenon that he can focus on for long – after all, they’re gathered together for something far more sinister although, at that point, he doesn’t quite remember the specifics. This may be a reunion, but it isn’t _that_ kind of reunion. 

(For a while, he thinks about going back on that thought, because by the time they’re several drinks deep, it _does_ feel like that kind of reunion, what with the way they’re replaying each other’s greatest hits, telling the stories in halting sentences, uncertainty lining every word until the others nod in agreement or interject with something. If he tries really hard, he can almost pretend that there’s no ulterior motive here, pretend that they’re getting sloshed for the sheer hell of it.

And then Pennywise plays his horrific fucking trick with the fortune cookies, and the thought returns.)

Occasionally, over the course of the next two days, those feelings hit him hard. The hardest is when he’s walking through town, looking for his artifact. No matter where he turns his head, there’s a memory breaking out of the ground like the dead in a cemetery. There’s lots of memories that relate to all of them being together, lots of memories specifically tied to that one summer, that summer that had somehow managed to be both horrifying and magical. But there are just as many memories that are specifically tied to Eddie. As he passes Freese’s Department Store (it’s been long sold to a massive conglomerate, made all shiny and pretty, but the original sign still hangs above the door, like a hunter’s trophy), he remembers that day down in the basement, where he’d left their initials on the chalkboard. Passing by the school, he remembers all of those days as well, remembers the places where he’d left their initials behind. 

He doesn’t make it to the Kissing Bridge, decides to detour to the park (which is still unfortunately dominated by the ugly ass plastic statue of Paul Bunyan, a little faded from the sun and age, but still as towering and hideous as ever), but he _definitely_ remembers kneeling in the dirt and using his pathetic excuse for a penknife to carve into the fence. 

If he has time, he plans on detouring there, just out of curiosity, to see if the initials are still there. He suspects that they’ve probably been covered up – maybe the fence has even been replaced, the wood replaced with metal; sturdier, safer, and considerably more difficult to leave a lasting mark on. 

It’s just curiosity. There’s no other meaning to it. He’s certainly not thinking about how damn good looking Eddie grew up to be, trying not to think about how easily he’s been throwing curse words around and how good those words sound coming out of his mouth, trying not to think about the darkness of his eyes and how easily they sucked Richie back in, just like a whirlpool. 

(If he wasn’t thinking about that before – which he was, because he’s a liar – the thoughts vanish a few moments later, when Pennywise decides to bring that ugly ass statue to life, decides to try to take a little bit off the top, all the while reminding Richie that his _dirty little secret_ isn’t much of a secret at all.

Richie has been back in town for less than twenty-four hours, but he’s already _really_ sick of that fucking clown.)

&.

After that, things go ass over tea kettle pretty fucking fast.

When Eddie is stabbed through the cheek by Bowers (who _definitely_ didn’t age as well as the rest of them), Richie feels like he’s thirteen again. Fear races up his throat, makes his mouth taste like acid, and it’s like he’s in Neibolt all over again, snapping Eddie’s bone back into place, hearing him scream, seeing his eyes go wide with pain. 

Eddie doesn’t scream this time, not even when Richie douses his wound with antiseptic, but that doesn’t stop Richie from being terrified, doesn’t stop him from wanting to scoop Eddie up and take off in his car, Pennywise be fucked, the entire town of Derry be fucked. 

But he can’t do that. He can’t leave the others behind, not now, not when they’re so close to maybe finishing this thing. And he knows that, even if he _did_ do that to Eddie, even if he did somehow convince Eddie to come with him, Eddie would never forgive him. 

And that scares Richie more than anything in the world. He may have forgotten about Eddie for literal decades, but the thought of losing their friendship again, of losing Eddie at all, makes his chest tighten, makes more acid flood into this throat. 

So he forges ahead.

&.

The thought of losing Eddie again is painful, but it compares in no way, shape, or form to the _act_ of losing him.

Eddie dies a hero, and part of Richie, a part buried in the depths of his heart, the part of him that’s still thirteen years old and in love for the first time, the part of him that left bits and pieces of his love all over town, the part of him that never truly forgot, dies too.

&.

It takes him three days to summon the energy to leave the Townhouse. He only knows this because he gets an automated email on his phone about his bank account, an email that appears in his inbox every single Thursday like clockwork. Otherwise, he would have believed both that only a day has passed since they scrambled out from underneath Derry and left Eddie behind, and that it’s been two months. Time has stopped meaning anything. Sometimes, he wakes up and the sun is out, peeping through the spot where the curtains don’t quite meet. Sometimes, he wakes up and the room is entirely black, aside from the neon green lights on the alarm clock next to the bed, displaying numbers that don’t mean anything to him.

The others have come in to visit him, drifting in and out like wisps of mist, sitting on the edge of his bed, bringing him food. Someone brought a bottle of whiskey, and while he can’t remember who it was, he’s mentally sent them his thanks every time that he’s taken a sip. 

But now, the bottle is empty, and more than that, the room is starting to smell of sweat and alcohol and something heavier, more than mere body odor, something that reminds him of the smell that permeated the tunnels leading to Pennywise’s den. Something akin to despair. It’s too strong to ignore any longer, so he throws the blankets off and drops his feet to the ground. He glances over at the clock and sees that it’s 4:30 in the morning. The gap in the curtains hasn’t started to show light yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time before the day dawns. 

It seems like as good a time as any to try and go for a walk. At least if it proves to be too much, he can retreat back to his room without embarrassing himself too much. 

He stands in the shower for what feels like an eternity, uses up the last sliver of unscented hotel soap and the last drops of terrible shampoo and watches the bubbles swirl down the drain, half-expecting all the while to hear a voice come drifting up, Eddie’s voice, out of the dark. 

_Richie? Why did you leave me behind Richie?_

He knows that it’s only his imagination, but he hears Eddie’s voice so clearly that he immediately turns the shower off and steps out, never mind that there’s still shampoo in his hair, caught in his brows and dripping down into his eyes. 

As nice as it feels to be (mostly) clean, he suspects that it’s going to be some time before he can have a shower that’s any longer than a few minutes. 

He dresses quickly, puts his glasses on and steps out into the hallway, closing the door softly. Once the sound of it locking has faded away, he’s left with absolute silence. There doesn’t seem to be anyone moving in the Townhouse. It’s unsurprising, given the time of the day, but it’s still creepy, and he hurries down the stairs, only momentarily pausing to shoot a look into the bar off the lobby. 

Ben is sitting on one of the stools, his broad shoulders hunched over, head resting on his crossed arms. There’s an empty glass at his elbow, still beaded with condensation, no doubt leaving a ring behind on the polished wooden surface. Somehow, Richie suspects that Ben isn’t actually asleep, is just resting his eyes, so before he can risk getting pulled into a conversation that he’s not ready to have, he heads outside. 

The horizon is turning orange at the very edge of the sky – above it, there’s nothing but indigo, streaked with dark gray wisps of clouds. The morning is cool and quiet – not even the birds have started yet. Jamming his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, he starts walking, the sound of his footsteps on the sidewalk echoing around him, bouncing off the heritage buildings.

He knows where his end destination is. There’s just one place he has to stop first.

It takes a little bit of walking and a quick Google search when his initial idea leads him to nothing more than a shuttered storefront, but he eventually finds a corner store that is open at this early hour. Once inside, surrounded by the smell of coffee that’s been on the burner for a little too long, he heads over to the obligatory section of the store that contains souvenirs. It’s a tiny corner (and realistically, it should be even smaller – why anyone would willingly want to come to Derry, Richie doesn’t know), but in the middle of the shelf, he finds what he’s looking for, ugly and exorbitantly priced. 

He buys it all the same. 

After, he walks through the streets of Derry as the city wakes up around him, as people begin to pull out of their driveways and head to work, as he starts to pass people sitting on their porches with their first cups of coffee of the day. He walks and he walks, and he gazes at the city around him, so utterly foreign and yet so familiar at the same time. The bones of the city are still the same, but the body and the features have changed. In some spots, it’s nearly unrecognizable. 

The Kissing Bridge, on the other hand, remains the same. 

It’s like looking straight into the past. Despite his fears from the other day, they haven’t made any major changes or replacements. The wooden fence lining the road approaching the bridge is still there. The paint is spotty in sections, and there is brown wood visible everywhere, exposed by the countless gouges marring the fence. He’s sure that, if he concentrated, he could find some differences, but if he concentrates, he’s bound to lose his nerve and turn back around. 

So instead, he approaches the fence and crouches down, eyes searching through the gouges, awkwardly duck-walking to the next section of boards, unable to remember exactly where he carved it. As he shuffles over further, he can’t help but be afraid that this was all for nought, that what he’s looking for is gone. Maybe the specific board that he’s looking for was replaced and has faded enough with time that it no longer stands out. Maybe someone crossed out their initials so that they could repurpose the space for their own. 

Just when he’s starting to buy into that idea, he finds it. 

_R + E._

His eyes start burning almost immediately. Ignoring them for the time being, he removes his purchase from the convenience store from the pocket of his jeans and starts picking at the price tag affixed to the handle. It’s definitely one of the chintziest things that he’s ever purchased; the pocketknife is small, and the handle is made of fake wood, covered lightly with a varnish that he could probably scrape off with his thumbnail if he was determined. The official city logo for Derry is painted on top in scorching color, looking completely out of place. 

Hooking his thumb into the divot on the blade, he folds it out until it snaps into position with a click. It doesn’t look particularly sturdy, and a cursory test is enough to reveal that it isn’t very sharp, but that’s not important.

He only needs it for one task.

Tightening his grip, he presses the point of the knife into the R and starts carving. 

By the time he puts the finishing touches on the E, the tears that were making his eyes ache have spilled over and soaked his cheeks. He has to squint through them in order to properly appreciate his handiwork. 

It might be the best thing that he’s ever created.

He takes a lingering glance at it before he gets back to his feet, returns the pocketknife to his pocket, and starts walking back towards the hotel. 

He’s never coming back to this town. He doesn’t care if the others want to have another reunion, an actual one this time. He doesn’t care if his manager tells him that a hometown show will earn him a hell of a lot of cash. He doesn’t care if the whole town starts burning and he’s the only one who can piss the fire out. 

It doesn’t matter.

He’s never coming back. 

He’s going to leave a part of himself behind. The best part of himself, maybe. He’s leaving behind the part of himself that loved Eddie, leaving behind the part of himself that loved as best as he knew how, as best as a thirteen year old could. 

He’s leaving that in Derry. 

It’s more than the city deserves.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, I can be found on [tumblr.](http://banshee-cheekbones.tumblr.com) :)


End file.
